By

Brad Wardell
Executive Producer & Designer

January 2018
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 TOPICS

1. Art Style evolution

2. Gameplay evolution
3. Status Report
4. The Star Control Community
5. Lore Talk
6. Adventure Studio
7. The Next Update
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 ART STYLE EVOLUTION
We got a lot of feedback on the art style. In the sense that we got a lot of criticism about the art style.

Courtesy of MonkeyPotion.
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During the development of Star Control: Origins we’ve looked at many different art styles:
 Early concept of Jeff.
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 Early example of the Trandals.
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 Early concept for Drenkend

In Star Control II there were several different styles employed based on who the artist was. Many of the aliens were
created by George Barr, a famous Sci-Fi illustrator.
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 George Barr’s work.
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 And in Star Control

Another famous artist on Star Control II was Erol Otus

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 Erol Otus is a pretty famous D&D illustrator.

Erol Otus work on Star Control II.

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 Another artist on Star Control II was Iain McCaig. You’ve seen his work too elsewhere:

Queen Amidala, Darth Maul, aliens from the various Marvel movies were created by him.
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 Iain McCaig also worked on the Force Awakens designing Princess Leia’s newer look.

And these are just 3 of the artists on Star Control II. Each with their own voice and style.

In the world of 3D modeling, certain styles are more difficult to pull off than others.

If you are not very careful in your art style choice you can end up with this:
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 Star Control 3 wanted a realistic look which was just not possible in the late 90s on computers. Thus…puppets.

When choosing an art style we have to take a few things into account:

1. Cost.
2. Performance.
3. Quality.

Pick 2.

By performance, what I mean is how will it affect the minimum hardware requirements.

Our minimum target is a an Nvidia 650 level card with 1GB of video memory. Believe it or not, this actually qualifies
as a relatively high-end video card.

This relatively high end requirement means we have a bit more leeway on cost and quality.
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 Because of the feedback we got, we accelerated the material system implementation which made the visuals a lot
less cartoony.
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 We also fixed the Commander’s neck. 😊 We also updated the way she looks slightly so that she’s less smooth,
more organic.

The planets got a rework to make them less bumpy, more realistic but still stylized.
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 Even the planets that are “real” (like Saturn) got a second pass.
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 We also updated the way the camera works to make the most of this change. Since planets look better up close, we
let players get a lot closer to planets so you can indulge in going through a given planet’s moon system.
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 STATUS REPORT
We are finally at the part of the project where things are moving incredibly quickly.

Even the screenshots in here, which I took quite recently, are now all outdated because new systems come on line.

The Mu’kay are now fully animated. This is the first pass but already they look pretty awesome. Especially in motion.
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 Fleet Battles continue to look better and better. We plan on an early February Founders update.
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 For testing out stories and missions I have to travel to other star systems. And exploring is super fun!
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 Planet exploration has gotten a lot more fun. Lots of work on the camera. We still have programmer art for the
minerals but they now exude light. We’re fiddling around with the planet sizes still because we don’t want it to drag
on.
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 The Scryve got another pass.
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 The new measured took entirely too long and we’re still working on it. Our whole animation system was predicated
on only animating one character. The Measured have dozens of them. We won’t be attempting that again for
awhile. 😊
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 THE STAR CONTROL COMMUNITY
The Star Control community has been awesome!

I was able to find the Star Control 3 source code. When we have a little time, we will go over it and look at releasing
it to the Ur-Quan Masters community. While I’m not a fan of the overall game in Star Control 3 (or the puppets or
space cows) the game does have some excellent parts such as the Super-Melee and there’s some great writing in
there.

I am posting some examples from the community below. Going forward, I’ll try to make sure I properly credit
whoever made it. The images below came from the Star Control community.
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FITTING STAR CONTROL TOGETHER

 If you’re new to Star Control, you may know about the classic series. Which is fine. You don’t actually have to have
played the original games. Star Control is the name of Earth’s interstellar organization for dealing with the universe.
What Starfleet is to the Federation, Star Control is to us.

In Star Control 1 (DOS, 1990) you were playing a strategy game.

In Star Control 2 (DOS, 1992) you were captain of a Precursor ship that was discovered on a distant colony.

In Star Control 3 (Windows?, 1994) you were once again called back to command a starship but also do some
strategy stuff too.

Star Control: Origins (2018) you are captain of a ship constructed by the Earthlings.

You can see why we’ve placed Star Control 1 & 2 in one universe, Star Control 3 in a different universe and Star
Control: Origins to its own universe. Thus the Star Control multiverse was born to keep canon straight.

What is important to us is to ensure that the existing canon for Star Control isn’t screwed up.
http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Star_Control has a wonderful history on Star Control 1 and 2 (but not 3).

http://wiki.starcontrol.com/ has a partial amount of Star Control 1 and 2 and a bit of 3.

So for example, http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Spathi has a history of the Spathi but only until the end of Star Control 2.
Thus, the Spathi of Star Control 3 are simply ignored.

Now, UQM is dedicated to the Ur-Quan Masters, so that makes total sense. But as we do Wiki.StarControl.com we
have a challenge in trying to have some consistency.
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 For Star Control: Origins, at least in the base game, we don’t have any of the aliens from Star Control 1, 2, or 3. Thus,
we don’t have to worry about continuity.

Right now, we have wiggle room with regards to the classic series because Star Control: Origins takes place before
Star Control 1 which has caused some to refer to it as a “prequel”.

Origins starts in 2086. In the Ur-Quan timeline, that would be one year after Earth had a clone revolt. In our
timeline it is one year after the Lexites left (who are not clones). As far as the Ur-Quan timeline goes, nothing
happens to Earth until 2112 when the Chenjesu show up.
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Star Control: Origins will take place roughly between 2086 and 2091 (not counting post-release expansions).
 Even if we wanted to merge the timelines, we still have the issue of the Small War (a nuclear war in the Ur-Quan
timeline, Peace Vaults and of course the Androsynth). Thus, as much as fans might love to see a single unified
timeline, it would be difficult to do and would not satisfy many of the hardest core fans.

For Origins, however, humans don’t run into any of the Ur-Quan timeline races no matter what since first contact
with a Ur-Quan timeline alien doesn’t occur until 35 years after Origins.

The Origins in Star Control: Origins refers to a multi-dimensional gate system the Precursors constructed that allows
them to travel to many other universes. Thus, in theory, the player’s ship could travel to the Ur-Quan universe or the
Kessari universe or any other Sci-Fi universe you can imagine. But that’s for another day.
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 ADVENTURE STUDIO
If you plan to create your own stories, you will definitely need to get used to Adventure Studio.

It’s not super friendly looking (yet) but it’s fairly straight forward to use. You create a new dialog. Say who is in the
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dialog and what ship they are in (if they’re in a ship) and the create a dialog tree.
 As you create different responses, you can have the game affect the player or the universe itself.
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 In this example, the choice in question results in the start of a battle.

But you could also have it create a flag and then refer to that flag later. Or have it spawn a ship. Or have it change
something else in the universe.

Last month I had talked about bounty hunters and reputation and some Founders were worried we were going to
have some sort of official reputation system with stats and such. That’s not what I meant by that. What I meant was
that as you travel, your actions will have consequences.

For instance, nothing stops you from going around murdering aliens. Every element in the game is tied together
one way or the other. Thus, if you attack a ship, that choice may spawn bounty hunter ships (or whatever you want
to call them) who are given various AI behaviors that will result in the game changing.

A STUPID EXAMPLE
So using Adventure Studio I create a Scryve ship and tell it to spawn at coordinates X, Y in hyperspace.

The player sees the ship and investigates which opens a dialog with the Scryve.

After some conversation, I set one of the options to give the Scryve the location of Earth.

If the player chooses that option, I spawn a Scryve destroyer fleet at location A, B with a destination of Earth. Upon
reaching Earth, everyone dies and the game is over. However, you can also intercept that death fleet and try to kill
it.

Now, when I’m done, I export it as a .mission and post it up on Discord for founders to play with. All they have to do
is double click on it and it’s added to their \documents\my games\star control\missions folder. Next time they load
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the game, that ship is there.

 Similarly, you guys can do the same thing. You don’t have to build an entire universe to mod the game. You could
create and share just a single mission.
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 PHOTO ALBUM
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